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Hello fintech friends,
Italy’s Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was founded by order of the Magistrature of the Republic of Siena 554 years ago in 1472. Twenty years later, Columbus made contact with the New World. Now, it is fighting off a takeover offer from its larger rival Intesa Sanpaolo.
Following the global financial crisis, the Italian banking industry sustained a period of severe contraction and consolidation, resulting in a market dominated by two domestic winners, Intesa and UniCredit. The megabanks both look to further consolidate (Intesa through an acquisition of Monte dei Paschi), but the world’s oldest bank isn’t ready to call it quits yet.
This week, Monte dei Paschi launched bids for peer banks Banco BPM and Banca Generali. The combined banks would bring about $40B in market cap and a total of $810B in assets to MPS.
The Italian government has weighed in in-favor of the deal, expressing an interst in preserving a third national champion bank. But MPS will first have to convince BPM and Generali’s shareholders, including French bank Crédit Agricole, which owns almost 30% of BPM.
Closer to home, PublicSquare’s stock is down 99% since its IPO.
The company, which was founded as an “anti-woke” alternative marketplace to Amazon, has reported over $160M in losses since going public.
This year, it abandoned its marketplace business entirely, announcing it would become a fintech platform instead. What type of fintech remains to be seen. The company recently acquired Credova, a point-of-sale provider of BNPL loans for firearms.
I also sat down this week with Clair CEO Nico Simko to talk about building an embedded earned wage access infrastructure for payroll and workforce platforms.
Clair is a quiet monster: The company crossed a $100M revenue run-rate in under two years and turned cashflow positive earlier this year. By the numbers:
➡️ $2 billion in wage advance volume run rate
➡️ 500,000 monthly active users
➡️ Over 300,000 active businesses on the platform
Check out the full (sponsored) episode below:
- Nik
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The Rundown
🏦 Financial Services & Banking
Even while they lobby fiercely against stablecoins in DC, major banks and financial institutions (from JPMorgan Chase to Bank of America to Wells Fargo) are considering their own proprietary stablecoin releases. Banks are looking to defend against nonbank competition: Visa, BlackRock, Google and DoorDash allrecently announced their own moves to enter the stablecoin ecosystem in different ways (from issuance to settlement). The rush for banks to issue stables comes as they announced the BankChain Alliance on Tuesday, a blockchain tech platform for treasury management, supply-chain finance and cash management. Good news for whichever stablecoin-as-a-service providers are ‘arming the rebels’…..
Citadel Securities and DTCC partnered with LayerZero to support the launch of a new digital exchange platform: ATLAS, a headless exchange infrastructure designed to streamline trading, clearing, and settlement into a single system.
BNY's newest whitepaper arguest that private markets' infrastructure needs a ground-up overhaul, warning that manual processes and settlement times of up to 30 days are becoming a bottleneck for growth as private credit and semi-liquid vehicles balloon in size.
The SEC proposed "Regulation Crypto Assets," a plan that would give digital-asset issuers two new capital-raising exemptions.
The FIX Trading Community and the Investment Association published a joint industry framework to digitize equity issuance.
🚀 Product Launches
Google Cloud unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services, a dedicated agentic AI suite built for capital markets and corporate banking.
Gemini announced a strategic partnership with Apex Fintech Solutions to distribute CFTC-regulated crypto prediction markets across Apex's broker-dealer network.
Starling Bank launched a new generative AI assistant aimed at helping small business owners automate financial tasks.
Walmart confirmed it would begin rolling out Apple Pay support across U.S. stores following years of using only its proprietary app.
Commonwealth Bank launched PaidIt, a specialized platform built to streamline complex payouts ahead of Australia phasing out checks.
Worth launched Decision Intelligence, an AI decisioning tool designed to help financial institutions approve small business credit applications.
🤝 Partnership Corner
Stable Sea expanded its relationship with WisdomTree by adding two new SEC-registered tokenized funds to its treasury management platform.
Quote of the Week
Stat of the Week
UK fintech funding dropped to its lowest level in a decade, per Finextra and KPMG. British fintechs raised just £1.8 billion in the first half of the year, the lowest amount since the £735 million they raised in the first half of 2016.
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See you next week. - Nik
